Baby Jails: The Fight to End the Incarceration of Refugee Children in America

Abstract

In Baby Jails, Philip G. Schrag, currently Delaney Family Professor of Public Interest Law at Georgetown University and Director of the Center for Applied Legal Studies, examines the United States’ detention of migrant children from the Jenny Lisette Flores case (1985) through the Trump administration. Schrag focuses primarily on Mexican and Central American migrant children to isolate three mechanisms through which the United States has addressed children seeking asylum: “humanitarian release, long-term detention, and family separation” (p. 7). Driven by his experience advising asylum applicants in Texas, Schrag attends to a number of detention facilities, including the T. Don Hutto Family Detention Center in Taylor, Texas; Artesia Family Residential Center in Artesia, New Mexico; Karnes County Residential Center in Karnes City, Texas; South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas; and Berks County Residential Center in Leesport, Pennsylvania. Over the course of twelve chapters (as well as a conclusion and epilogue), Schrag excels in fulfilling his purpose: to examine the Flores case and its legacies as well as attempts to halt or otherwise reform migrant child detention (p. 5).Schrag communicates this history through clear prose that outlines decades of lawsuits and government policymaking in a manner accessible to those outside the legal profession; he deftly references legal proceedings, journalistic accounts, and reports from non-governmental and advocacy organizations as well as interviews with many of the attorneys central to this history. Particularly helpful are the sub-sections within each chapter, which are dedicated to, for example, detailing arguments made at various hearings or legislative developments. While Schrag's inclusion of major figures’ biographical information adds to the text's length, these details contribute to the monograph's comprehensive nature.Beginning with three chapters dedicated to the Flores case (originally filed in 1985 as Jenny Lisette Flores v. Edwin Meese III), Schrag describes how a suit intended to establish reforms in detention practices resulted in two separate settlement agreements and a Supreme Court decision. The second Flores agreement (1997), among other things, placed limits on where and for how long children could be detained and provided for their access to services such as education and counseling (p. 58). Although the settlement was slated to end after five years (or three years, provided the INS met the detailed standards), it remained in effect to meet the Trump administration's challenges in 2018 (pp. 59–60). Schrag's assessment of how the Flores agreement then differentially affected unaccompanied and accompanied migrant children is one of his strongest contributions.For example, in his analysis of Hutto, which the Bush administration opened to detain mothers and their children, Schrag discusses litigation that asserted, in part, that the government violated the Flores agreement by detaining children in improper facilities without the necessary services; the attorneys called for the release of both the mothers and their children (p. 93). However, per a judge's order, enforcing the limits on child detention could have meant the separation of children from their detained parents (p. 96). This case thus revealed tensions in the Flores agreement: “that Flores didn't apply to parents, and that it didn't apply to children who had crossed the border along with parents or other adults” (p. 99). Further accounts of lawsuits pertaining to the enforcement of the Flores agreement at other detention facilities follow in subsequent chapters and are interwoven with an analysis of other measures intended to protect certain migrant children. For example, under the Obama administration, the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) protected unaccompanied minors from expedited removal while accompanied minors faced hasty deportation and detention in the remote Artesia facility as part of an effort to deter migration (p. 134). Schrag navigates the reader through this legal landscape, drawing comparisons between different populations and facilities and producing an excellent account of migrant child detention.Baby Jails raises important questions about how this history intersects with ongoing conversations about migrant protest and advocacy, crimmigration, and other instances of migrant child detention. For example, while Schrag mentions a 2015 hunger strike at Karnes (p. 146), future research can ask how migrants, especially children, protested their treatment through legal or other means. Additionally, while Schrag briefly discusses the separation of Haitian families detained at Guantánamo, he leaves that case relatively unaddressed and does not mention the experiences of Haitian unaccompanied minors detained there between 1994 and 1995 (pp. 225–26). Nevertheless, Baby Jails is an important work which complements other recent scholarship on family separation, especially Laura Briggs's Taking Children: A History of American Terror (2020). Baby Jails should appeal to scholars of history, sociology, and law interested in migration, childhood, and Latino/a studies as well as individuals seeking to understand how migrant child detention operates in the United States.